


you were right about the end

by orphan_account



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-27
Updated: 2010-08-27
Packaged: 2017-10-11 06:42:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/109573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"What's your name?" Arthur asks idly one night. He clearly doesn't expect an answer.</p><p>Eames tells him a name. It's even the real one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you were right about the end

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from The National's "Daughters of the Soho Riots"

He likes to think he was content, before.

He was a more than capable thief, an even better con man. He was excellent, really, managed to slide into whatever persona he needed, a slick suit that he discarded as soon as it was no longer useful. He slid into someone's head and shucked them as soon as he needed nothing else from them.

He enjoyed what he did.

It isn't like he was missing much.

*  
He's introduced to Cobb because the job sounds interesting. He's never worked in dreams before, doesn't think it's possible, despite the murmurs on the street, unavoidable and getting louder. He's curious.

The curiosity grows with Cobb's protégé, who is quiet and still and insecure in himself, tucked up in suits and slicked back hair and eyes so dark he could drown in them. Eames is fascinated. He's infatuated, he'll admit that, and only more so when Arthur demurs his offer of a drink without, somehow, seeming to reject him. He's so insufferably polite.

Eames wants to rip him apart and put him back together, hair tumbled and suit askew.

He's distracting. He's distracting enough that Eames can't even manage to put his full attention towards the dream technology, which is entirely fascinating, complex and rich and capable of opening up endless opportunities in fraudulent behaviour.

He thinks it may have been the best meeting he'd ever decided to take. Two weeks later, when the job ends with Arthur shooting him in the head to keep him from a ravening crowd of the mark's projections, he knows it.

It helps that Arthur takes him up on the drink, after, if only that.

*

It takes two more jobs with them and a successful forgery of a mark's mistress before Arthur obliges him. "I can't believe you did that," Arthur mumbles into his mouth, and Eames can think of much worse reasons for someone to be sleeping with him than professional admiration.

The sex is spectacular, but honestly, Eames was expecting that. What he wasn't expecting was that Arthur stays the night, and that he isn't put out by that fact.

*

Eames doesn't get bored. That's a surprise in itself. He never seems to last beyond a night; it's all the time it takes him to figure someone out. He can't seem to figure Arthur out, so he stays close, keeps an eye on him, keeps trying to rectify that mistake.

The more he learns, the more interested he gets, interested in the way Arthur slides a hand through his hair when he's frustrated, mussing it, then painstakingly putting it back together. Interested in how unbearably young he is. Interested in the way he falls apart under Eames' fingers.

He keeps sleeping with him until it's almost a regular thing, as regular as a thing can be in his life. He takes more and more jobs with them, partly because he's still in love with the feeling of sliding into someone else's skin, and also because it means Arthur is never quite out of reach.

*

 

They take a job by themselves. Mal's just had James, and Cobb's at home with her, at home with his family. But Eames should be clear here. He takes a job. Arthur practically has a row with him when he finds out what it is.

"You're planning to extract from the president of Bulgaria," he says, flatly.

"Mhm," Eames says. "It'll be fun."

"I'm coming with you," Arthur says, and Eames can't quite manage to hide his surprise.

"If you get arrested I have to teach someone else what I like in bed," Arthur says grumpily, and Eames just takes it as the veiled compliment it is.

It goes off without a hitch, and Eames would like to say he expected that, but he's as surprised as Arthur seems to be. They make it back to their hotel room in Sofia, payment received, everything done, before Arthur pushes him against a wall.

Arthur's laughing into his mouth, can't quite manage to kiss him because the corners of his mouth keep turning up. "That was insane," he tells him, as soon as he pulls back. His cheeks are pink, flushed. He looks almost like a child, almost like he ever knew how to be a child.

"And that's why no one was expecting it," Eames says, and Arthur starts laughing again, his joy inescapable and contagious.

"The president," he mumbles into Eames' mouth after another failed kiss. "You are out of your mind."

"You like it," Eames says, and Arthur doesn't deny it.

Eames manages to pull himself away from Arthur long enough to open the bag they received, a bulky duffel.

It's the most money Eames has ever received. It's in small bills, so the amount is really nothing more than he's used to, nothing more than he's grown accustomed to with Arthur's sharp brain working out every possibility, but it's the size that matters. It takes up space.

Even Arthur looks impressed, and Arthur rarely looks impressed.

"We should fuck in the money," Eames says.

"That's tacky," Arthur says.

"It's _classic_," Eames says. "It's classic for a reason."

Arthur gives him an unimpressed look.

"Fine," Eames says. "But at the very least we need to take a bath in it."

Arthur rolls his eyes, but he helps Eames fill the bathtub with the cash.

"You know we're just going to have to sort it again," he says.

"You're a mood-killer," Eames says.

It doesn't stop Arthur from sliding into the bath, careful, fully dressed, but still. He gets in. "Well, this is overrated," he says, arms crossed, surrounded by money they have no right to have. Then he cracks a smile.

_I am so in love with you,_ Eames thinks, and doesn't say it.

*

"What's your name?" Arthur asks idly one night. He clearly doesn't expect an answer.

Eames tells him a name. It's even the real one.

*

Arthur gives him a key to his apartment. He doesn't make a spectacle about it, because he rarely makes a spectacle of anything.

Eames wants to make a grand spectacle of it all, but he refrains himself.

*

Eames is just off a plane to Los Angeles when Arthur comes in the door. He's barely managed to drop his bag, barely managed to sit, get himself a beer from Arthur's fridge. Arthur's a welcome addition.

Arthur comes in, and he seems loose, noticeably so, enough that Eames reaches out for him, tugs him down onto the couch into a sprawl of limbs. He slumps down beside Eames and says, "we should go on vacation," like a great announcement, which is fair, because it rather is, coming from him.

"A vacation," Eames says.

"Well," Arthur says, seems uncomfortable with the very idea. "Dom and Mal are taking the kids to Disneyworld."

"Are you hinting that you want to go to Disneyworld, darling?" Eames asks.

Arthur pinches his side. "I made a list of interesting places," he says, because of course he did. He pulls it from his pocket and brandishes it as if Eames won't believe him otherwise.

"Shoot," Eames says, and slides his head onto Arthur's shoulder, closes his eyes. He can practically feel Arthur rolling his eyes, but it's still only a few moments before Arthur's hand starts carding through his hair.

"Berlin," he says.

"Not there," Eames says. "I'm wanted there."

"You're wanted everywhere," Arthur says.

"I am especially wanted there," Eames says, and he listens as Arthur's pen scratches, crossing it off the list.

They go to Paris, which Arthur's only been to before on business. Arthur has a well-ordered list of things to do, but they don't end up doing most of it. They stay in their hotel room, and it's both exactly and not at all like home.

Eames wonders when Arthur's apartment started being home. He can't be arsed to care much, either way.

*

They're both busy, and he doesn't see Arthur for three months. It's to be expected, but it doesn't make it easier. There are phone calls, and emails, and sometimes, sometimes Eames manages to bully Arthur into turning the conversations dirty, sometimes the conversations drift into something almost saccharine, the _I miss you_ unsaid but present.

It isn't even close to the real thing, and they keep missing one another; Arthur is in Puerto Plata when Eames gets in on a red-eye to Los Angeles. He lets himself into Arthur's apartment with a key that makes it legal, makes it seem less pathetic, and lies on his side of the bed, trying not to feel like a stranger in Arthur's room.

He isn't sure he entirely succeeds.

*

When he sees Arthur again, it isn't the same. There's nothing wrong about it, not exactly, but a stretch of three months and his hand and nothing else, he was expecting something spectacular. Something that justifies turning a faithless man into one of the faithful.

It's Arthur. It's Arthur, slightly stressed, run a little ragged, carrying something that's weighing on him like a stone, but it's still him. He isn't sure why he's surprised that Arthur isn't something more.

It's what he gets, and it's somehow both disappointing and more than he could possibly deserve.

"What's wrong?" Arthur asks, quiet, after sex that is spectacular and yet somehow not everything he needs.

"Nothing," Eames says, because that's close enough to the truth.

*

Mal dies while he's in Montreal. That's all there is to say about it. Mal dies, and everyone's heartbroken, and life goes on.

Except it doesn't. Except Eames comes into Los Angeles as soon as he hears, fucks over a job he'd been planning for months, and finds Arthur on the floor of the living room with a half empty bottle of scotch. He hates scotch; it's always been Eames' drink. Eames wonders how much of that choice of drink is Arthur's penchant for penance in situations that don't need it.

"Sweetheart," Eames says, and drops to his knees, wraps an arm around Arthur and lets him sob into his coat, wet, gasping sobs that he wouldn't have managed sober.

If that was it. If that was it, it'd be expected. It'd be _fine_. But Arthur's all stiff-pressed suit and poker face at the funeral, and he doesn't lose the face after.

*

It happens in stages. Eames stays, after, stays while Arthur tries to keep Cobb out of jail, impotent while Cobb tries to outrun the police over a crime he never committed. Arthur's frustrated, frustrated and heartbroken and Eames can't blame him anything.

It's just that it doesn't change. Eames takes short jobs, close jobs, can't seem to bring himself to leave the country, and every time he comes back, a day away, a night away, Arthur's just a little less there, trying to be the perfect point-man from half a world away and not managing it, trying to seal up his heart and managing that better.

It cracks into something raw when Eames comes home a night early to an empty apartment. He waits. Arthur comes in an hour later, and he smells like cheap cologne and smoke. He smells like all the places he's been, and Eames wonders if he made it to a bed or if he kept it in a bathroom stall, an alleyway, kept it where minor betrayals should belong.

Arthur stops, stock still in the doorway. His hair's mussed. Eames can't figure out why that's the worst part.

"I'm sorry," Arthur says finally, matter of fact, and then goes into the bathroom. He locks the door behind him, and Eames waits until the shower's running to let himself out, to slide into the city. He doesn't come back until he smells nothing like Arthur and everything like Arthur came home as.

He doesn't apologize when he walks in the door, Arthur sitting on the couch like a statue, waiting for judgement. He doesn't apologize, and Arthur doesn't say anything, just follows him to bed and lays his head down on Eames' chest like absolution.

"Stop," he says, only when he's sure Arthur's asleep. "Please."

_I am so in love with you,_ he thinks, and doesn't say it. It leaves a bitter taste in his throat.

*

It takes two days for it to break wide open, two days of them tiptoeing around one another like they're fragile, breakable. Eames isn't entirely sure why he's staying, why he doesn't take the first plane out, hide somewhere. He's good at that. He isn't good at whatever this is.

"I'm going to go help him," Arthur says on the second night, face shadowed. They're in bed, just barely touching, and Arthur's staring at the ceiling. There's something in his tone that tells Eames that he's going alone, and that a scummy forger is not invited on his trek to martyrdom.

Eames doesn't say anything, and he waits until Arthur's asleep to get up, to pack a bag. He leaves the door of Arthur's apartment open behind him, open to thieves and murderers and everyone else who has an equal share to Arthur. Eames is worse than either anyway. He's both.

Eames takes a card from an account they share for emergencies only. He charges a flight to Vegas, a hotel, enough chips to set him up. By the time he's run out of chips, the card's cancelled. By the time he flies back to Los Angeles, his clothes are fluttering on the lawn in front of Arthur's building like a perverted lawn sale, cheap and tawdry looking on the grass.

He leaves them where they lie.

*

Eames doesn't see him until the Fischer job. He keeps tabs on him, makes sure Dom isn't dragging him into the mud, making sure he isn't getting himself killed without Eames' useless eye over him. He tells himself that it's a professional courtesy, tells himself that it's looking after a former colleague, perhaps a future one. He indulges himself in two failed attempts at relationships and countless successful fucks.

When Dom comes, it both is and is not a surprise.

*

Arthur is the perfect picture of professionalism when he sees him. His poker face is entirely intact.

That's more of a surprise than he wishes it was.

*

It's a late night, a late night some time in, and the warehouse is asleep. He's almost managed to get used to the fact that he barely recognizes the person in front of him at all. He's getting used to it.

He palms a key in his hand, then perches on the edge of Arthur's desk, where Arthur's illuminated in dim light, looking over the folders on Fischer. Arthur looks up.

"The key to your apartment," Eames says, and drops it on Arthur's desk. It was his totem. He's going to have to think up another.

"Oh," Arthur says, stares at it. "I moved."

"Ah," Eames says, and almost thinks to snatch it up, to hold it tight in the palm of his hand, but it doesn't work that way. He can't keep holding onto it. "Never mind, then."

"Eames," Arthur says.

Eames doesn't wait to hear what he has to say. He walks away.

*

The job goes off without a hitch, in the end. With hitches aplenty, truly, but Cobb gets what he wants in the end, so that's enough. Arthur gets what he wants in the end. It's enough.

"You mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling," Eames says, during, and Arthur doesn't shoot him in the head, leave him spiralling in limbo, so he supposes he gets away with that, one final jab.

When he wakes up, everything feels the same. It isn't, he knows it isn't, but fundamentally, nothing is changed.

After he gets his bag from the luggage carousel, he waits outside the airport, staring down the cabs with his bag in hand, waits for something. He doesn't know what he's waiting for. He doesn't know if there even is anything to wait for.

It doesn't matter. Nothing comes.


End file.
